Immigration: Freedom Riders back to fight Alabama law

A historic marker is located outside the Greyhound bus terminal in Montgomery, Alabama, where Freedom Riders were met by a mob and beaten on arrival May 20, 1961. Two of Freedom Riders who risked their lives to integrate Montgomery's bus station are back in the capital city with a new cause: repealing Alabama's immigration law. (The Huntsville Times/Robin Conn)

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) — Two Freedom Riders who risked their lives to integrate Montgomery's bus station 50 years ago are back in the capital city with a new cause: repealing Alabama's immigration law.

The Rev. C.T. Vivian and Catherine Burks-Brooks were among hundreds who gathered Friday for a two-day event that includes a Saturday morning rally on the Capitol steps and a children's march to the governor's mansion.

Vivian said Alabama's tough immigration law is based on the same hostility as segregation laws 50 years ago. "White America has never seen anybody as fully human except other white people," he said.

Burks-Brooks said the attitudes faced by brown-skinned people today remind her of the experiences of black Alabamians in the 1960s. "But because of what we did, it is not as open and not as rough," she said.

Burks-Brooks was one of the Freedom Riders on a Greyhound bus headed from Birmingham to Montgomery on May 20, 1961. Their goal was to test a U.S. Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate transportation and to force an end to separate waiting rooms designated white and colored.

When they reached Montgomery, an angry white mob attacked the riders. Several were beaten, but Burks-Brooks and a few others escaped in a cab.

Vivian, who had been active in earlier lunch counter sit-ins around the South, traveled to Montgomery to replace some of those injured. He joined the Freedom Riders as they left Montgomery on a bus bound for Jackson, Miss., where they were arrested upon their arrival.

Vivian, 87, of Atlanta, said even though 50 years have passed, some in the South still want to look down on people of color and mistreat them. "We have made our laws around putting down the lowest level and giving a little more to the ones right above it," he said.

Burks-Brooks, 72, of Birmingham, said the interest among young people in protesting Alabama's immigration law reminds her of the enthusiasm that she and other college students had in Nashville in 1961 when they volunteered to become Freedom Riders. She advised the young people in Montgomery to go through the same training as the Freedom Riders to make sure they practice nonviolence and are prepared to be attacked and arrested.

"They need to understand the consequences of going into something like this," she said.

Several states, including Arizona, Utah, Georgia and South Carolina, have passed immigration laws, but immigrant rights groups and civil rights activists chose to make their stand in Montgomery, in part, because of the city's history as a civil rights battleground.

"Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat here. This is where Martin Luther King was a pastor — where his home was bombed. The march from Selma, the bus boycott, all these moments in the history of the fight for justice are marked here and our presence now is needed to mark another struggle: to end Alabama's anti-immigrant racial profiling law," said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change.

Proponents and opponents of Alabama's immigration law have called it the nation's toughest and most comprehensive. It affects many functions of everyday life, including proving legal residency to buy a car tag, get a job or register a child in school. Some provisions have been put on hold by federal courts.

Proponents say they designed the law to force illegal immigrants to self-deport and open up jobs for legal residents.

Burks-Brooks said the law had a dramatic effect on immigrants in her Birmingham neighborhood. "All of the sudden they vanished. I go to Walmart and don't see any," she said.

Alabama's governor is asking the Legislature to clarify and simplify the law. The state's attorney general is recommending the Legislature repeal a few sections put on hold by the federal courts.

People arriving for the Montgomery rally said that's not enough. They said a mishmash of state immigration laws is not the answer and Congress must create a way for people to gain legal status if they have a history of working in the country.

"These workers are highly valued and needed," said Adrienne DerVartanian, director of immigration and labor rights at Farmworker Justice.

Gov. Robert Bentley said he welcomes the groups' views because "I believe in free speech and that's what this is."

But he said Alabama's law was necessary because the federal government wouldn't act. "We are not going to repeal the bill," he said.